Insight meditation

Asiaprod wrote:

Well,I am not sure about the concept of having a seperate meditation for insight. To me, the purpose of any meditation is to gain insight. I practise every day, it gives me great insight, and helps me to control my life. In fact, I dread to think what my life would be like if I did not meditate. I do know that I see my life spiral down if I miss it for any extended period of time.

Asiaprod wrote:

Hi Jon
Sure, In my case the form of Buddhism I follow focuses mainly on my life now, the environment around me and how I can understand and influence this environment. We have a great saying "If the shadow is crooked, so is the society"
In my case, I meditate on the way I act, the way people around me act, and the way I and those people interact. From meditation I gain insight into these complex relationships. What I mean is that it is like learning the mechanics of life. I gain an understanding of why people act the way they do, what drives them, what are there fears. From this, I learn how to communicate with them, understand them, and how to help them. On the personal side, I gain insight into myself and what drives me. What faults I have, what things I do that are a habitual reaction. Combined together, these action all lead me to make correct choices.
Any practitioners of the I Ching out there, I am an avid one myself, understand the principles of the influences surrounding us in nature. How these principles can play a part in shaping our destiny. Buddhism has what are called the 3,000 life conditions, that is that under a given set of circumstance, we will react in a given way according to our Karma. Meditation helps one to steer a course through these conditions in the same way that the I Ching helps us steer a path through the influences in nature. In a nutshell, Buddhism works with the inner influences and the I Ching works with the external influences. I combine both together to form a sort of road map to life. The insight I gain is indeed great. And believe me it really works. When meditating, I am not interested in any great mysteries of life.
The Buddha himself told people not to waste their time trying to understand these things. He was very clear that the path lay with ourselves and the interactions in our daily life. And that what was most important of all was our actions which we use to shed of bad karma and create great new good karma. The point that many forget is that karma is shed in the same manner in which it is created. You do a bad deed, you obtain a spoonful of bad karma, you do a good deed you loose a spoonful of bad karma. Lets call it the Diet of Life. The quest can be likened to finding your ideal weight.
During a normal day, our minds are a chaotic mess of emotions, inputs, events and happenings that are going on around us. On top of this we are dealing with our own problems. Though one might think otherwise, we actually spend very little consistent time thinking on any one subject. Our thoughts are constantly networking on a thousand different issues, yet we still manage to come up with ideas or come to conclusions. Think of what we could achieve if we actually spent a dedicated amount of time on any one of these subjects or were just to give our mind a little freedom to explore on its own (from here springs enlightenment). We could learn lot. That is the gift of Meditation, is a very special tool that we use to calm our mind and give it unrestricted freedom to pursue its own thoughts or a specific thought.
I hope Jon that explains a little of what I mean. If you have any question on this, do feel free to ask.